Photo courtesy of Feran familyIn 2002, he carried the Olympic torch through the French Quarter en route to its destination, Salt Lake City, for that year's Winter Olympics.

Fred Feran, a Czech runner who boycotted the 1936 Olympics in Berlin because of the anti-Semitism rampant in Nazi Germany, died Thursday at St. Joseph's Rehabilitation Center in LaCrosse, Wis. He was 92.

Mr. Feran and his wife, Jean, settled in New Orleans in 1947, where his relatives lived. In 2002, he carried the Olympic torch through the French Quarter en route to its destination, Salt Lake City, for that year's Winter Olympics.

The Ferans moved to LaCrosse, where their daughter, Maureen Freedland, lives, after Hurricane Katrina destroyed their New Orleans home in August 2005.

Mr. Feran was born Fred Feuermann in Zakopcie, Slovakia (later Czechoslovakia), but his family had to move a year later after their house was burned down in a pogrom, an organized massacre of Jews.

As he grew up, Mr. Feuermann started running, and he amassed dozens of medals. He was so fast -- and so popular -- that he became accustomed to hearing people chant, "Feuermann! Feuermann! Feuermann!" when he ran.

In 1936, the Czech government chose him to compete in the 1,500-meter race at the Summer Olympics, which Adolf Hitler envisioned as a way to showcase the Nazi myth of Aryan superiority. But two days before the team was to leave for Berlin, Mr. Feuermann and a teammate decided to join a multinational boycott of the games that was led by Jewish athletes. Among the boycotters was Herman Neugass, a champion Tulane University sprinter known as "The Green Wave Express."

It was a tough decision, Mr. Feran said in a 2002 interview, but not as difficult as those he would face as a Jew trying to survive in Europe.

"You can't have everything," he said in that interview. His wife said, "The Olympics are not important when your life is at stake."

Mr. Feuermann would lose four siblings and dozens of other relatives in the Holocaust.

Those losses haunted him for decades. "He never cried on anyone's shoulder," Rabbi Edward Cohn of Temple Sinai said, "but he never forgot the severe losses of his siblings, and he would often rehearse them, even in his sleep."

In 1939, as World War II loomed, he decided that his best chance for survival would be in Palestine, which the British controlled. Three days before German troops occupied Czechoslovakia, he dropped out of his engineering school, and he and his brother Erwin joined about 700 other Jews on the Agios Nicholas, a Greek ship. They were at sea for four months waiting for permission to land.

After they debarked, Mr. Feuermann became Mr. Feran because he had been urged to anglicize his surname. He worked in the oil industry and joined the Czechoslovakian Overseas Army in Jerusalem. Mr. Feran was demobilized in Brazil, where he met his wife, who also was a Czechoslovakian.

They moved to New Orleans, where his mother's relatives, the Pulitzers, lived. Leah Pulitzer Antin, a co-owner of Antin's Jewelry, sponsored their entry into the United States. Mr. Feran sold jewelry by day and repaired clocks at night. As word of his expertise as a clock repairman spread, he acquired clients throughout the United States.

Survivors include his wife, Jean Feran; a son, Russell Feran; a daughter, Maureen Freedland of LaCrosse; and four grandchildren.